Division of Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
Marine Genomics Laboratory, Department of Life Sciences, Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX 78412, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2021 Dec 8;288(1964):20211931. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2021.1931.
Knowledge of adaptive potential is crucial to predicting the impacts of ocean acidification (OA) on marine organisms. In the spiny damselfish, , individual variation in behavioural tolerance to elevated pCO has been observed and is associated with offspring gene expression patterns in the brain. However, the maternal and paternal contributions of this variation are unknown. To investigate parental influence of behavioural pCO tolerance, we crossed pCO-tolerant fathers with pCO-sensitive mothers and vice versa, reared their offspring at control and elevated pCO levels, and compared the juveniles' brain transcriptional programme. We identified a large influence of parental phenotype on expression patterns of offspring, irrespective of environmental conditions. Circadian rhythm genes, associated with a tolerant parental phenotype, were uniquely expressed in tolerant mother offspring, while tolerant fathers had a greater role in expression of genes associated with histone binding. Expression changes in genes associated with neural plasticity were identified in both offspring types: the maternal line had a greater effect on genes related to neuron growth while paternal influence impacted the expression of synaptic development genes. Our results confirm cellular mechanisms involved in responses to varying lengths of OA exposure, while highlighting the parental phenotype's influence on offspring molecular phenotype.
了解适应潜能对于预测海洋酸化（OA）对海洋生物的影响至关重要。在棘尾鱼中，已经观察到对升高的 pCO2 行为耐受性的个体差异，并且与大脑中后代的基因表达模式有关。然而，这种变异的母本和父本贡献尚不清楚。为了研究行为 pCO2 耐受性的亲代影响，我们将 pCO2 耐受性的父亲与 pCO2 敏感的母亲杂交，反之亦然，在对照和升高的 pCO2 水平下培养他们的后代，并比较了幼鱼的大脑转录程序。我们发现，无论环境条件如何，亲代表型对后代的表达模式都有很大的影响。与耐受亲本表型相关的昼夜节律基因在耐受母本后代中特异性表达，而耐受父亲在与组蛋白结合相关的基因表达中起更大的作用。在两种后代类型中都鉴定出与神经可塑性相关的基因表达变化：母系对线与神经元生长相关的基因有更大的影响，而父系则影响突触发育基因的表达。我们的研究结果证实了与适应不同长度的 OA 暴露相关的细胞机制，同时强调了亲本表型对后代分子表型的影响。
